International Jazz Day at Home!

Do not allow #COVID19 to become the refrain of your day.

Long live 30 April: International Jazz Day.

A few personal thoughts about jazz on the occasion of International Jazz Day, under the conditions of COVID-19.

I consciously avoid retelling the entire history of jazz here. That history has already been documented very well in countless books and studies, and in the end one repeatedly arrives at the essential point: jazz emerged from the blues and from the many musical-cultural varieties created through musicians playing together across religion, colour and race.

For all its constant evolution, jazz carries both laughter and lament.

It remains tied to the language of the soul and to the human root.

Jazz musicians have repeatedly managed to stretch their music into unfamiliar and complicated situations, breaking down existing boundaries.

Because boundaries often live between the forehead and the struggle each of us carries in the chest.

That makes it all the more fascinating that jazz today possesses an intellectual image while simultaneously embodying an ideal marriage between brain and soul — reason and feeling.

For all its compositional and technical sophistication, jazz is, in my view, an extraordinarily powerful improvised music.

It lets you walk the thin edge of suffering — and dance while doing so.

One can analyse this, of course, but ultimately jazz is understood through the cultivated experience of living it — live.

Today, in the time of the “corona refrain”, isolation has created rules and conditions within which we have to live inside our four walls.

But jazz is a live business, no less than rock or classical music.

It depends on direct communication with the audience.

30 April 2020: stages, podiums, theatres, clubs and concert spaces are dark, with barricades at the door.

But jazz musicians know how to handle the situation according to an old logic:

If the mountain will not come to the prophet, the prophet goes to the mountain.

“I always like to discover new rules...” says Herbie Hancock.

After a rhetorical pause, he adds:

“...so that I can then break them.”

And yes — International Jazz Day now comes from unusual stages:

living rooms, kitchens, sitting rooms, verandas and balconies.

Digital platforms become stages that unify us on equal terms.

“Jazz knows no borders; it is a universal language of equality and peace,” Hancock says in a video message for International Jazz Day.

The global coronavirus crisis has restricted our social community, but the celebrations of International Jazz Day will not be cancelled.

Many musicians have decided to embrace one another musically across the world on this day, communicating with audiences on every continent.

Another encouraging thought comes from one of my favourite composers, Quincy Jones:

“Jazz is powerful enough to make people forget their differences and come together. Jazz is the embodiment of an art capable of transforming extremely negative and restrictive circumstances into freedom, friendship, hope and dignity.”

When I look at the historical path of jazz, I dream that I could have experienced live the great figures: John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Bill Evans, Chet Baker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Antônio Carlos Jobim and others.

Unfortunately that is no longer possible.

So instead I return, with longing and gratitude, to their legendary recordings.

For International Jazz Day, here are ten of my favourite albums:

John Coltrane — A Love Supreme (1965) Bill Evans — Portrait in Jazz (1960) Chet Baker — She Was Too Good to Me (1974) Ella Fitzgerald — Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book (1956) Billie Holiday — Body and Soul (1957) Stan Getz / João Gilberto featuring Antônio Carlos Jobim — Getz/Gilberto (1964) Miles Davis — Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1957) John Coltrane — Blue Train (1957) Henry Mancini — The Pink Panther (1964) Miles Davis — Kind of Blue (1959)

For those who do not care about International Jazz Day, I suggest celebrating some of the alternative calendar holidays beginning in May 2020:

International New Grape Day, Hairdresser Appreciation Day, Honesty Day, and the many other cheerful alternatives appearing on calendars during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Whatever happens, protect your health.

Stay safe.

© Eda Zari Düsseldorf, 30 April 2020 Originally published at 27.al